A man from the bank called.
Not accusing. Just… cautious.
“Mrs. Collins,” he said, “we’ve received an inquiry regarding the withdrawal you made earlier this year. Your family has requested clarification.”
Margaret smiled, even though he couldn’t see it.
“There’s nothing to clarify,” she said. “The account was mine.”
He hesitated. “They’re… upset.”
“I imagine they are.”
After that, the inquiries multiplied. A letter from a financial advisor she had never met. An email from a mediator suggesting a “family reconciliation process.”
Margaret declined them all.
She wasn’t hiding. She wasn’t running.
She was finished.
At the literacy center, a woman named Ana struggled with basic sentences. Sixty years old, newly divorced, ashamed of not knowing what she had been taught to hide. Margaret sat beside her every Thursday afternoon, patient, steady.
“You’re not slow,” Margaret told her once. “You were just never given time.”
